Can Facebook's New News Feed Help it Solve Its Content Problem?

Facebook unveiled major changes to its News Feed today, redesigning the most critical part of its site to make it more visually appealing and calling the finished product a “personalized newspaper.”

The design is sleek, and a definite improvement over the current iteration, but it may not solve one of the site’s biggest problems— the glut of low quality content shared on it.

Yes, Facebook has a real content problem. For many users, the News Feed has turned into a stream of irrelevant updates shared by people they hardly know after years of accumulating friends. Likes and subscriptions, for many, have built up too, adding to the glut.

If you’re unsure how widespread the problem is, just note that this tweet by The New York Times’ Nick Bilton was retweeted by over 7,000 people, seemingly in approval:

Going to Facebook has become the equivalent of opening the fridge & staring inside, even though you’re not hungry.

The content problem is not an abstract one either, it is actively causing users to leave the site. In a Pew study released last month, 61 percent of Facebook users said they took breaks of several weeks from the social network, and 27 percent said they plan to use the site less this year. When Pew asked them why, two of the top three answers were content related. “Just didn’t like it,” said some. “Content was not relevant,” said others.

Facebook is by no means in trouble, it is still used by 67 percent of online Americans according to Pew (Twitter, in comparison, is used by 16 percent). But, the content problem goes to its core—if you don’t enjoy your News Feed experience, you’re likely to significantly cut down the time you spend on Facebook, using it primarily for messaging and simple photo browsing instead of content discovery.

The redesign has a chance to improve things. It wisely gives users the option to browse through separate feeds of close friends, all friends, pages and everything combined via a prominent navigation toggle in its top right corner. This should make the commotion a bit easier to manage and perhaps more enjoyable.

At the end of the day though, Facebook’s content is only as good as what’s shared and it will take careful curation to optimize which friends you want to hear from. Not everyone will be willing to put the effort in to make the site work best though. As BuzzFeed editor John Herrman put it in a tweet: “I honesty think my Facebook account is unrecoverable — partially my fault, but there’s no way I’m going to put in the work to make it better.”

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